User blog:Reaper with no name/Mass Madness
It's time to address an elephant in the room. The listed masses often don't make sense. There. I said it. Let's start with the big one. The movie notes Knifehead as being "8700 metric tons" (which equates to about 9600 tons); far from the 2700 tons claimed by every other source. However, this would make Knifehead far, far heavier than Slattern (who is close to twice as tall), which simply cannot be. Meanwhile, the artbook claims Horizon Brave, Tacit Ronin, and Romeo Blue each weigh over 7000 tons, which is patently absurd. Tacit Ronin is very clearly designed to be a light speedster. Meanwhile, Cherno Alpha (clearly a heavy) and Coyote Tango are both also Mk Is, and yet are nowhere near as massive. But it gets stranger still, when we look at the blueprints for the five Jaegers featured in the movie. They list Cherno Alpha as weighing 6912 tons, Striker Eureka as 6650 tons, Coyote Tango as 7450 tons, Gipsy Danger as 7080 tons, and Crimson Typhoon as 6122 tons. Those numbers don't make sense, either, because Cherno Alpha can't be lighter than Gipsy Danger (as it is "the heaviest Jaeger in the service"). And even if it was, that certainly wouldn't explain it being a good ~500 tons lighter than Tacit Ronin. In summary, we have multiple listed masses for most of the Jaegers and at least one of the Kaiju. And a lot of the time, they don't make sense. So, keeping that in mind, how should we approach the question of mass? Well, if we ignore the 7000+ figures for those three Mk Is, the numbers given in the artbook, statcards, etc (in addition to being the most complete set of numbers) all seem to make sense in terms of mass relationships (Crimson Typhoon is lighter than Striker Eureka and Gipsy Danger, who are both lighter than Coyote Tango and Cherno Alpha). Judging from the mass relationships shown by Horizon Brave, Tacit Ronin, and Romeo Blue in the artbook, I would wager that Tacit Ronin is around Crimson Typhoon's weight (perhaps a little lighter, since it lacks a third arm), and Romeo Blue and Horizon Brave are around Coyote Tango's weight (with Horizon Brave the heavier of the two). The 6000 and 7000+ ton weights for the five main Jaegers in the blueprints need to be thrown out simply because they make no sense. After that, I would say we either need to throw out the "8700 metric tons" figure given in the movie and stick with the numbers from the statcards, artbook (excepting those three Mk Is), etc, or embrace it. If one chooses to throw out the "8700 metric tons" figure, then he could assume that someone was either drunk in LOCCENT that day, or that it was simply a continuity error. If, however, one embraces the 8700 figure, then there is more work to do, because the ratio between Knifehead's 2700 tons weight and his 8700 metric tons weight could be used as a sort of multiplier to figure out the other weights. In other words, if Knifehead is actually 8700 metric tons and not the 2700 tons that otherwise makes sense, then Gipsy Danger would be around 6380 metric tons (1980/(2700/8700)), Crimson Typhoon would actually be around 5550 metric tons (1722/(2700/8700)), Slattern would be around 21770 (6750/(2700/8700)) metric tons, and so on. If one decides to take this path, then the approximate weights (in metric tons) of everything we have good numbers for would be: Whichever approach (rejecting or embracing the 8700 figure) one chooses to take is fine, because in the end, it's the mass relationships that matter, rather than the masses themselves. Category:Blog posts